Composer's challenge: From quartet to piano

Plain Truths— my song cycle for baritone and string quartet, including a requested choral part— was finished at last. Now just one task remained before my deadline: I must produce "piano reductions."

It's a task I've previously looked upon, I confess, as drudgery, or at least work that's not composing.

In my post-compositional glow, having beheld the glorious wave of creation washing over the numinous sands of human existence and all that, rendering pristine and pinkish the wide beached expanse of glistening scalloped shells peeking from the— well, from that expanse— there is really nothing more to do, one concludes— nothing more, I say, than to seek new vistas, conquer new territories, step over the odd husk of a horseshoe crab— didn't see that there— and, after polishing off a Fudgsicle, to otherwise get on with it.

In other words, one wants to write a new piece.

Reaching for the hatchet

How dreary it seems to rewrite for piano what one has just written for strings. But it must be done. A choir's pianist jolly well likes to have a piano part, for starters. And if the song cycle is ever to have a chance for more performances, it's easier to tempt one pianist than four string players.

But after spending weeks and months sculpting the two violins, viola and cello— shaving, nudging and coaxing the stringed instruments into a blossoming garden of counterpoint— you reach for the hatchet, the eight-pound sledge hammer, the pry bar, and the splitting maul with a sigh and start whacking.

You've written, for instance, a high, repeated bit for the first violin, chirping an octave or two above everything else. Below that, the second violin plays a longer, languid phrase overlapping the first's.

Limits of human hands

On the bottom, the cello hops high, then very low— well under the viola, which has pride of place with a tune ranging up over the second violin at times, at other times meeting with the cello in surreptitious parallel thirds.

Leaving aside the challenge of translating the character of four distinct lines played by four distinct voices onto the keyboard, some of the notes are simply impossible to play simultaneously by two human hands wielded by one person. The notes are too far apart. So what to do?

In this world, one does what one must, and chooses, moment by moment, which event is most important. You sacrifice a high or low note, eliminating it if it's repeated nearby, or moving it an octave if the insertion isn't jarring.

Grabbing a note

Or you keep it because the effect is too good, and trash something else because that's now out of reach. Or you delete filigree in the middle to fill out a harmony or to make a tune sing better on the keys.

You revoice, which is a gentle way of saying you grab a note by the collar and heave it. I mean, a note that's minding its own business leaning against the kitchen doorway chatting with the neighbor who just moved here from upstate, you fling into an armchair in the living room, next to your cousin who's idly looking at a crossword puzzle on the coffee table you forgot to replace with Victorian Architecture before company arrived.

And after all the inserting and deleting and collaring and flinging, you revoice it again because now it's just herky-jerky. The notes fit under the hands, sort of, but now they're just that: a spreading agglomeration of stagnant pitches. The line vanished somewhere along the way. Now you have to make it smooth, make it pianistic.

Like dieting

So you rework it again. But now you ignore the original and put your head down, bearing in, redrawing phrasings, picturing a right thumb tolling this note, the left pinky catching this at the start of an arpeggio that used to be a cello's double stop but now, for the piano, is…

Music. Look at that. You're writing music.

So this is what it feels like. Of course, you were just doing this yesterday, weren't you?

I used to look on the piano reduction as… well that was my problem, wasn't it? I called it "making a piano reduction," as if I had to go on a diet or crawl into the middle of an old azalea with pruning shears and get scratched, because you can never really prune an old azalea properly without getting scratched. But no, it's not like that.

It's called composing. Look at that, I said! It was a pleasant surprise.♦


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